“Justice League” – San Diego Comic Con Footage

Okay, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is the link to the San Diego Comic Con footage for DC’s Justice League movie. I just got around to watching it myself yesterday, so I feel compelled to report on it, but I’ll try to keep my comments brief (yeah, right: Snyder’s directing this thing, so I’m sure his name will come up eventually. Go look for my write-ups on BvS).

First, the music. I hope this is just trailer hype music, and that the final movie will be a little less…. what’s the word I’m looking for here… Metal? Bar Band? Bar Band Metal?

I can’t imagine sitting through this entire movie with a soundtrack that sounds like this. Not that it’s bad, but I’m not sure that it fits the expected aesthetic of the superhero genre.

Cyborg is underplayed in this trailer, and I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, he’s a cyborg, yawn, but clearly there’s more to him than that, as evidenced by the file footage from Batman vs Superman, so I wonder if he’s being downplayed here as a result of CGI work still being done on the final appearance of the character and his interaction with the rest of the players.

Sadly, I’m still not sold on Aquaman as a viable character. I understand that this isn’t going to be my old Saturday morning cartoon Aquaman, but even Ben Affleck concedes the point/problem with Aquaman when he says, “I understand you can talk to fish.” Jury’s still out on this.

I like the kid playing Barry Allen. Never seen him before, but I like what I see here. Kind of a Spiderman-type feel, character-wise: young, unsure of himself… I especially like the whole, “That seems like an over-simplification,” comment. I’m digging this guy, so far.

Not sure I like the costumed appearance of Batman in this one, but I suppose a billionaire has got to have a hundred different suits, right? Look at Tony Stark: how many suits did he have by the end of IM3?

Finally, and I’m not really sure how I’m going to play this one, so I’m just going to have to say it: Bruce Wayne running around, meeting up with special people, looking for warriors… I saw this when Samuel L. Jackson did it with the Avengers. It feels like a straight rip-off. I know there are only X number of ways to bring together a bunch of disparate characters into a team-type format film, but I don’t know, man… it just feels like they took the easy way out with this approach. But here, instead of Nick Fury, who nobody on the planet knows about, we get Bruce Wayne, who everybody on the planet should know.

But…

But…

Overall, I must say that this trailer is intriguing for me for a couple of reasons.

First, there are some characters that I am genuinely interested in at this point, which is what the trailer should be doing.

Second, it doesn’t seem–at least from this footage–to be a typical Zack Snyder (there he is!) film; it’s not dark (so far), it’s got a sense of humor (bordering on too much, actually. Bruce Wayne is pretty casual/slick for a jaded Dark Knight who buried Superman.). I don’t know if this is a result of Snyder learning from the reception that MoS and BvS received or if Ben Affleck has already had an impact on the construction and tone of the Justice League movies.

Either way, I am upgrading my projection on these movies (despite Zack Snyder’s track record of head-faking me) from “decidedly pessimistic” all the way up to “cautiously optimistic.”

Let’s just hope that the trailer really is indicative of the film to come.